You'll lose your reader if you are vague, not clear, and not present. We love details, personal connections, stories.

I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river.

I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time at my real work.

Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.

While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.

Let's say I've directed that [writing] energy into writing my latest book but suddenly, I really want to write about an onion. I don't say to myself, "No, you have stay on the subject," because I know that the longer I stay on the subject the more boring I get. So, if my mind wants to write about an onion, it might be a deeper way to go into what I'm working on, even though it might seem irrelevant. This is how I've learned to follow my mind.

Read books. They are good for us.